With this year’s incredible line-up of activities, we know you won’t want to miss a thing. But in case you do, 7a*11d offers a festival “blog” with daily critical commentary (description, introspection, cultural implication, and maybe just a tad of gossip...) and interviews with participating artists by selected local writers. Our 2010 edition features the commentaries of Natalie Loveless and Daniel Baird.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Sakiko Yamaoka: Come With Me (EW)

Tuesday October 28th

This afternoon Sakiko Yamaoka led a small group of adventurers through the financial district of Toronto in search for 'The Best Place to Sleep,' a piece whose name changes to 'Come With Me' when performed with participants.

Yamaoka led us through a series of banks where as a group, we lay down to sleep in hallways, in front of ATMs, and near information desks. The actions became, for me at least, a tense experience of anticipation -- how long until someone would come to chase us away? The contrast of responses that we encountered was surprising. In some places, security guards ushered us out the doors almost immediately, while in a large TD, we slept beside the benches and potted plants and weren't disturbed at all. In an RBC along the PATH concourse, we attracted a flock of security guards who were on the verge of calling in the troops, while in a BMO, it was an employee going out on his lunch break that asked us to leave. The performance was actually cut short after an action the artist did herself in a CIBC, when a security guard followed her for some distance out of the building, asking her for contact information as other staff stood by with medical kits. Unsure of whether this was out of concern or suspicion, Yamaoka felt it was prudent to end the excursion.

In contrast to our guerrilla-style actions was our second action of the day, in a bank where we asked permission to perform. This action ended up being a lot longer, nearly five minutes, and I was inundated with the sounds of typing, talking and footsteps echoing down marble hallways. The beeping of the ATMs and even the sound of receipts being ripped up became unmistakably loud. The most surreal part of this particular action was when customers needing to use the ATMs were asking Shannon Cochrane, a festival-leader who was documenting the action, for permission to step around our sleeping bodies to access the machines.

Yamaoka has performed this piece in different contexts around the world -- in banks, museums, train stations and even lying in the streets at pedestrian crosswalks. She explained to me that the motivation for this piece was several. Physically, she is very interested in finding small breaks in space and time that she can fill, using actions that take up short moments of people's lives and fit into differently-sized spaces. In addition to this, she related a rather self-depreciating explanation of how she has given up hopes of achieving a lifestyle of luxury, believing that her art will never be part of the elite, institutional Japanese art market. As such, she seeks a way to access and impact the lives of the rich, even if it is just peripherally; she wants to force interactions with them to see what their lives are like.

For the next three days Yamaoka will be performing a separate piece, 'Wind from Sky,' at the following locations:Wednesday October 29: Poppies, at Queen West & Dovercourt.Thursday October 30: a variety store at the northeast corner of Queen West & Bellwood.Friday October 31: a shrubbery patch at the northwest corner of Queen West and Crawford.Based on a poetically illogical statement "A person is alive. A plant is alive. Therefore a person is a plant", she will strive to achieve planthood starting at 12PM each day.

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Our writers...

2010

Natalie Loveless is an artist, teacher and writer. She recently completed a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, on transdiciplinarity and its implications for new models of pedagogy and socially engaged art practices. She is a visiting assistant professor in the Visual Arts Department of the University of Western Ontario and is on the editorial board of >> liminal << the journal of new performance. Natalie's blog posts are marked '(NL)'.

Born in Los Angeles, Daniel Baird lived and worked in New York City from 1989, where he was a founder of The Brooklyn Rail, a magazine for which he worked as an art editor, feature writer, and monthly columnist. Since moving to Toronto in 2000, he has written on the arts for numerous Canadian publications, including Canadian Art and Border Crossings. He is the former editor of The Walrus, and remains a regular contributor on topics as diverse as contemporary art and history, political theory and religion. Daniel's blog posts are marked '(DB)'.

Writers 2008

Andrew James Paterson is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, film, performance, writing, publishing, and music. He has presented and performed work locally, nationally, and internationally. His body of work has been characterized by a fascination with relationships between bureaucracy, technology, and bodies. Dynamics between performers and audiences has been another recurring obsession. Paterson performed in the first two 7a*11d festivals, and has been an enthusiastic observer at all of the others.

Elaine Wong, a recent graduate of McMaster University, has been involved in theatre production for eight years, and has been writing for even longer. Her most recent effort combining the two was the play she co-wrote for the McMaster Honours Performance Series, 16 Stunning Storeys from the City Streets, a piece examining the definition of street art and audience interaction.